Create Your Own Pond
I played tennis last week with some friends from the tech world. Then we ran into Steve Schlafman over coffee, who I hadn’t seen in awhile. It was great to catch up with old friends we “grew up with” in the NYC tech scene.
Steve quoted a line from our friend Satya Patel that sat in my brain over the weekend: create your own pond, and do it your own way. It was said in the context of starting a VC firm. But it can apply to any business or organization.
A VC firm, specifically, is two things at once that don’t naturally go together. It’s a group of people you actually want to be around for years. And it’s a group of people you’re trusting with a lot of money and a decade of your professional life. Friend group and fiduciary, at the same time. Tough combo!
The people you’d most want to grab dinner with aren’t automatically the ones you agree with on risk, or strategy, or how to treat a founder in a hard moment. When it all overlaps, it’s rare and kind of magic. When it doesn’t, there isn’t much holding it together.
Compare that to a Blackstone or a McKinsey. You more or less know what you’re getting. The institution is the thing. It’s bigger than any one person, it outlives them, and the culture is legible from the outside because it was built to be. You’re joining a company.
A small firm isn’t that. There’s no institution underneath. It’s just the people and the chemistry, and you often can’t tell from the outside what it’s really like until you’re already in it.
There’s been a lot of movement in venture lately. At first it looks like restlessness, or chasing a bigger check. But I wonder if it’s the odds of walking into someone else’s already-formed group and finding it’s your exact fit, the friends and the substance both, are just low. So a lot of us conclude the only way to get it right is to build it ourselves.
What strikes me is that Steve took that advice and built a pond in a completely different place. It was given about VC, but he heard it as permission to find the container that actually fit him, first a solo coaching practice, and soon a coaching firm with two partners. Not the pond he was pointed at. His own.
That’s the whole thing. There’s no template because everyone is solving a different equation. Autonomy, money, location, how much you want to hustle, how much you’re willing to market yourself, what style you can actually stand.
Nobody weighs those the same way. So there’s no right answer to copy, because no one else is even answering your question. It’s all n=1.
You can spend a whole career looking for the right room. Sometimes the honest answer is that you have to build the room, or the pond.
